Miles Of Promises To Keep

Sebastian Zumvu *

My joy knew no bounds when Narendra Modi came to power because he had promised to bring back black money from foreign accounts and deposit Rs 15 lakh into every Indian citizen's Bank account.

The day he was sworn in, I jumped with joy, clicked my heels together and did a cartwheel just like we see only Archie and Reggie do in comic books. My financial woes are finally over, I hummed to myself, Acche Din have come!

When my son told me that evening his college fees are overdue and that the authorities are insisting on early payment, I told him not to worry: "Uncle NaMo is going to take care of it, son. Happy days are here, son. As a matter of fact, Mummy has gone to the market to buy vegetables and groceries without any money. She has taken along only her Debit card confident that the amount has been deposited in her account!”

Mummy returned empty-handed from the market and we went to bed that night without dinner.

But my octane-fueled spirit refused to be contained not unlike a genie whose magical lamp has been rubbed.

When my cousin from the village came to me a few weeks later with heart-rending tales of how his Bank has been insisting for immediate repayment of a Rs 50,000-loan he had taken to purchase seeds and agri-requirements earlier in the year, and how he is unable to oblige because of the poor rains and the devastating heat wave that scorched his crops, I brushed aside his concerns: "
< Don't worry, be happy. NaMo hain nah? Didn't he promise to waive off all farmers' loans? You worry over trivial stuff, cousin!”

I hugged him, patted him on his back, and sent him back to the village. I swear he went away whistling without a care, surely outdoing Bobby McFerrin on that don't-worry-be-happy tune.

A few months later, demonetization came about and the cash-reliant rural economy worsened. Weeks later, I got urgent summons to visit my cousin in the village: He had climbed a mango tree and fell – and the rope around his neck broke his fall. I watched with tears streaming down my face as his five-year old son lit the funeral pyre.

With shortage of cash in the market post-demonetization, there was less demand for vegetables and the prices of famers' produce halved. This exacerbated the woes of farmers and they began to hold nation-wide protests.

But our NaMo had everything under control: When some 30-something thousands of farmers began a protest march from Thane to Mumbai one day, no media houses – print or electronic – covered the convergence and the nation went unaware. Our leader ensures what or how the media informs the masses!

I watched on TV news of the Prime Minister travelling abroad very frequently and my chest swelled with pride with the warm reception he was given by the host countries. I was proud of my Prime Minister who, in four years, spent 800 days in public rallies, 200 days abroad and a whopping 19 days in Parliament. This shows that he is a man of the masses, has incredible global appeal and demand, and is a very effective parliamentarian taking care of parliamentary requirements of the greatest democracy in the world in just 18 days.

Doesn't really matter if NaMo has spent in 4 years Rs 1,484 crore while his predecessor spent in 9 years only Rs 642 crore on foreign jaunts. This buttresses the fact that NaMo is a statesman appreciated world-wide, unlike the demure, clean-as-a-blank-page predecessor who was neither sweet nor sour, nor bitter that someone was always calling the shots from behind his shoulders!

I was however, puzzled by the mathematics and the logic of the Government. I have never been good in mathematics or with numbers, but I can easily make out that 526 is less than 1600. And I almost rubbed my chin raw trying to make out how the Government made a better deal and why the country paid Dassault company Rs 1600 crore for a Rafale aircraft when the earlier dispensation had made a mutual agreement with the French company for Rs 526 crore per fighter craft. Qatar and Egypt paid around Rs 700 crore for a Rafale fighter plane…

But right at that moment, realization hit me right between the eyes with the force of a Mach-5 jet-fighter plane: Charity begins abroad! Once again, my chest swelled with pride when I began to understand the clever strategy our Government adopted to pursue diplomatic relations. Magnanimity is the keyword. NaMo is creating favorable international relations through charity!

And a two-month old, hastily registered Ambani company which had no expertise or experience to even make a paper plane was made the local partner in the Rafale deal. After all, the Government is serious to promote its pet programmes like Skill India and Make in India!

We Indians are doing great, I mused. Going at this rate, we'd soon be masters of the universe, I thought and was about to reach for the phone to call up friends in the neighbourhood for a celebration when the phone rang. It was the local grocer calling me up to clear my grocery dues.

This phone call woke me up from my reverie like a bucket of cold water poured on me during winter: NaMo has miles of promises to keep before he sweeps… not the floors as a Chowkidar, but the polls. I have this gut feeling that NaMo will be handing over letters of support from NDA allies to Rashtrapati Bhavan in the evening of April 14, 2019 requesting the ever-smiling President to swear him in as the PM.

Jeer him, cheer him; love him, laugh at him – NaMo is coming back because of the simple reason that he has the numbers, which is all that counts in a democracy. He won over the masses, the erstwhile not-so-supportive populace considering his un-kept promises, but by the surgical strike at Balakot which, by the way, was most successful not as a strike against terror camp in Pakistan (where Reuters news agency quoted a resident taxi driver saying several pine trees were hit and a crow was killed), but as a surgical strike into the psyche of each and every patriotic Indian convincing them that India needs a leader who is decisive and determined to take head-on terrorism be it in Pakistan, or Myanmar.

END PIECE

A group of young Naga girls in Delhi, dressed in their most comfortable shorts and tops in the heat of an unforgiving summer, was walking down a fashionable street when a middle-aged man started to follow them around from a distance ogling at them and slavering gallons of saliva. Irritated with the continuous stare of the man, one of the girls couldn't take it anymore and decided to give him the scolding of his life. But the problem was that her Hindi vocabulary was limited to a pitiful smattering which could be counted on her fingers.

However, she was so riled up that she decided to go ahead with the tongue-lashing she had in mind for the stalker. She turned around, stood right up nose-to-nose with the man, and, in a chaste mixture of Hindi and Nagamese, demanded: "Aap kya saita hain?”

Her friends sat down on the pavement guffawing while the stalker had that no-one-at-home look on his face and shrugged as if to say, "I have no idea what you are saying.”

(The writer belongs to a political party. These are his personal views.)